


Sonata In Progress

by ArchangelUnmei



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Bar/Pub, Gen, M/M, Poetry, Theatre
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-17
Updated: 2010-12-17
Packaged: 2017-10-13 17:28:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/139833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArchangelUnmei/pseuds/ArchangelUnmei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Counterpoint - A Frenchman and an Englishmen, bartender and patron. Two perspectives, one romance. Or it would be a romance, if they ever managed to hold a conversation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. En Francais

**Author's Note:**

> Written (again) for the [FrUK Lovefest](http://community.livejournal.com/what_the_fruk/255226.html) over at what_the_fruk. The prompt was for Francis as a bartender at a little hole-in-the-wall bar, and Arthur as the quiet, solemn patron who always leaves little poems on the napkins.
> 
> Guest starring Hungary as the pub's owner.

If you'd asked him ten years ago where he'd be today, he would have said Paris, or Milan, or Vienna. He would never have said London, not by choice, and he certainly wouldn't have seen himself bartending in a cheap pub on the lower side of the West End. He wanted to be a painter, and really he still is, though he's only just beginning to be able to afford paints and canvases again and he's sadly out of practice. But he'd learned the hard way that paintings don't always sell, especially when you're a nobody with nothing to your name. And when paintings don't sell, you can't even get a ferry ticket back across the Channel to go home.

But, really, it isn't a bad life, and he's content with it now, if not quite _happy_ , and he could go back to France now if he wanted to but somehow he never gets around to it. The pay's actually quite good; the owner says it's so she doesn't have to mind the bar herself. And it leaves him the mornings and most of the afternoons free to paint, since he doesn't open the bar until dinner.

And some of the regulars can be very entertaining.

Some of them, Francis doesn't even know their names, so mentally and on the tabs sheet he calls them by nicknames he chooses to help him remember them.

There's one in particular, Francis calls him 'Britannia'.

Britannia comes in on Friday and Saturday nights, late after the theatres adjourn, regular as clockwork. Sometimes he'll appear on weeknights too, but Friday and Saturday, always. It gets so that Francis has a whisky and soda waiting at the bar for him when he comes in. The first time he does it, Britannia gives him a startled look with wide green eyes and a muttered thanks; ever after all he gets is a grunt of acknowledgment, if that.

Francis is intrigued by him, takes to watching him when he's not busy doing other things. If the telly's on, Britannia will idly watch it, paying the same amount of attention whether it's a football game or the news or the single French station with the terrible reception that Francis flips to when the bar is nearly empty. It makes Francis think that Britannia isn't really seeing what's on the screen. If the telly's off he'll just stare into space, twirling a pen between his fingers.

Britannia dresses all in black. It ranges. Sometimes, he wears pressed black slacks and neat black button-ups that would make Francis think he might have a job in government except that he never wears a tie and never wears tweed. But other times, it's chunky black boots with rubber soles two inches thick, grungy black jeans and tattered black t-shirts that make Francis wonder if perhaps he's some sort of underground punk rocker instead. But eventually, he decides that Britannia must work at one of the local theatres, though doing what he has no idea.

He never pays attention to anyone else in the bar, except for Francis when he's ordering another round. He never causes a fuss. He's just _there_ , Friday and Saturday and sometimes in between. Francis probably wouldn't pay any attention to him either, except there's something besides his eyebrows that makes Britannia memorable.

Francis had nearly missed it, the first time. He'd only just started working there, had only been in London a month (was that three years ago, now? Four?). Britannia slipped out just before closing time, leaving his tumblers and the remainder of his fish and chips for Francis to clean up. Tired and more than ready to trudge back to his tiny flat and collapse into bed, Francis had wandered over to collect the glasses and wipe down the table. He nearly swept the napkin off into the trash before he noticed the writing.

 _Rose_ is the word that leapt out from the spidery writing first, and then _heart so soft_ , and then he realized it was poetry.

There's a box of them now behind the bar, and every month Francis carefully empties it and takes them home to put with the others in the larger box he keeps at home. He doesn't know why he keeps them, since he and Britannia have never had anything even close to a conversation, civil or otherwise. But once in awhile, when he's feeling particularly lonely and dreaming of the fields around Lyon, the Rhine and the Seine, the majestic Alps, he'll take the box and sit cross-legged on the creaky wooden floor of his flat. He'll spread the napkins out; smudged ink and pristine, blue and black and red, four lines and eight and ten. And he won't buy that plane ticket for Paris like he always means to.

The poetry is never about anything in particular, just a few lines jotted down here and there, usually describing the beauty of nature or the innate pleasure in a cup of British tea. Nonsense little poems, but the phrasing always strikes something in Francis. Some resonance, between his own artist's soul and something he can sense, can feel in Britannia.

Sometimes, on Tuesday mornings with the rain streaking down the windows, Francis will balance a canvas across a bookshelf and pick up a brush, and draw a total blank. He'll sit and sulk for awhile, and then go and fish around in the box, picking a napkin at random. And somehow, usually, whatever he picks is just enough, just what he needs to get going again, and often he'll lose track of time until his shoulders are stiff and he can't move his neck and he has to run or he'll be late to open the bar.

There's a stack of canvases growing in the corner, and he's actually beginning to feel proud of his work again. He doesn't know if they're worth buying, but maybe someday he'll work up the courage to try selling them again.

But until then, he hurries through the week, waiting for Friday night without quite realizing he is.

He never really thinks about Britannia in terms of anything but _Britannia_ , so when Elizaveta informs him he actually has a _name_ , Francis isn't quite sure what to think. She still keeps the books even if she doesn't mind the bar anymore, and one day she asks him what his various tab-names mean.

"Britannia?" she asks, eyebrows raised, and Francis rolls his eyes.

"He's about my height, hair a little darker, grouchy but not violent." He doesn't know if Liz is aware of the box of scribbled napkins that sits under the counter next to the traditional cricket bat, but if she is she's never asked. "I call him Britannia because he seems to have an imperial air about him, and he doesn't seem to notice his eyebrows are about to conquer his face."

After she finishes laughing herself to tears, she tells him "Britannia" has a name.

Arthur Kirkland.


	2. In English

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Lyceum Thearte at London's West End has been performing _The Lion King_ six nights a week for over ten years.

If you'd asked him ten years ago where he'd be today, he would have said right here, sitting in a pub with a whisky and soda in front of him and some loud blokes in the next booth arguing over whose turn it was to pay tab. But he wouldn't have thought the pub in question would be quite so small, or on the West End, and he wouldn't have thought the bartender would be French.

Arthur is particularly confused about the West End bit. He's still not quite sure how he came to work there, except that sometime during his last year studying anthropology at Cambridge a friend had begged him to help out the severely understaffed theatre department, and Arthur had fallen in love. Not with the theatre, per se, and certainly not with acting. He still _detests_ actors, bloody melodramatic screeching bitches, the lot of them.

But he'd fallen in love with the way a theatre _works_ , the way beauty can come out of sheer chaos, the adrenaline rush that comes when something goes wrong and you have to find a way to fix it _fast_ , preferably before the audience notices because _the show must go on_. And when he's a tech, he can order the bloody idiotic actors to get out of his way and they'd better hop to or he can hit them with whatever piece of scenery he likes. And up in the rafters rigging lights, or back in the booth running the electric boards, he doesn't have to deal with them at all.

He'd started coming to this pub when he started getting hired consistently around the West End, hopping from theatre to theatre until he got offered the position of head lighting tech at the Lyceum Theatre. He was promoted to assistant stage manager, then master stage manager three years ago now, and he thinks sometimes he might die if he has to hear one more joke about Rafiki's staff.

Arthur'd been rather surprised when Liz announced she was retiring to get married. He never bothered to learn the name of the French bloke who took her place. He seemed decent, and at least he was friendly enough (a little _too_ friendly when it came to the female patrons who drifted in from time to time. They didn't have any female regulars and secretly Arthur figured it was the bartender's fault).

Arthur never bothered to learn his name, but he watches the frog, and wonders what brought him to London. When he first arrived, several years back, he'd seemed so sad and lost. Arthur had let his mind drift, as it often does, thinking about homesickness and loneliness and before he was quite aware he'd been absently scribbling a few lines of mediocre poetry onto a napkin. Embarrassed beyond all belief, he'd quickly slipped out and _forgotten_ to take said napkin with him.

The frog never acknowledges that he finds the napkins, but night after night and drink after drink and year after _year_ , Arthur keeps writing scraps of poetry for no reason he can quite pin down. He thinks perhaps it's because he usually comes straight after work when he's tired and frustrated, and writing a few lines is enough to soothe his soul before sleep. Perhaps it's because after awhile it's just _habit_. Perhaps it's just a desire to reach out, though why he should reach out to a flirtatious French bastard, he has no idea.

But Arthur observes. He's always been good at observing. When he was a child, he'd learned to keep watch for that twitch in Ian's nose that he got right before he did something that got them all into monstrous trouble. In the wings of the theatre, that skill is honed to an instinct, to _know_ when a costume is about to tear or a set is about to fall or there's about to be a bloody great fist fight back stage.

He can't remember when he first noticed the frog's hands. Probably somewhere along when he was pouring a drink on one of the odd Wednesdays that Arthur came in and he didn't have it ready and waiting for him, like a good bartender should. At a glance, Arthur thought perhaps his nails were painted (how like a Frenchman). Looking again, he realized they _were_ , but not with varnish. He makes a point of looking, after that, and sees the frog has paint under his nails and in the creases of his knuckles and one memorable night a smudge across one high cheekbone - a different color every night.

Arthur wonders what he paints.

 _Portraits_ , he thinks one Saturday morning, a roll of black gaffer's tape between his teeth as he balances precariously fifty feet above the stage, trying to secure a spot that's come loose before this afternoon's matinee. Surely a frog like him would paint nothing but naked ladies with soft curling hair and glittering blue eyes and lovely rounded breasts. Trying to picture the smiling bartender with a naked lady on each arm causes the roll of tape to go plummeting to the stage, where it bounces twice and rolls into the orchestra pit. Arthur nearly ends up following it.

 _Abstracts,_ he decides, sitting in the back of the house and trying not to fall asleep as the company runs through a musical number for the third time. He doesn't really have anything to do at rehearsals, but he's stage manager so he has to be here anyway. Something with a lot of color and vibrance and chaos. The frog always seems quick with a smile, Arthur thinks he must have a very active, loud social life.

 _Landscapes,_ is what he thinks when he's sitting in the bar, watching the frog over the rim of his glass and trying not to brood. There's something there, something about him, something that seems connected to the earth. Something passionate, because the French are nothing if not _passionate_ , but actually it reminds Arthur a little of himself. Seeing the frog gesture out of the corner of his eye, sometimes, he imagines a brush in those fingers and that fits, that works, like Arthur in black boots tromping around the catwalks.

Without thinking about it at all, his poems speak of lilies and roses.

One night, leaving the theatre late on a Thursday, in the midst of turning his collar up against the damp, Arthur sees a familiar face on the street and waves her down. Liz smiles and laughs and slows for him, and says he hasn't changed a bit and asks if he still drinks whisky.

Arthur snorts as though there could be no other option, and she grins at him, all teeth and mirth like always. "I thought so," she says, laughing. "Francis keeps ordering the best scotch and I know he doesn't drink it himself."

"Francis?" Arthur asks before his mind has quite caught up with his lips, and that's how he finally learns the frog's name.

Francis Bonnefoy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about all the theatre geekery, it just slipped (can you tell I'm a lighting tech?).


End file.
